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I make use of a small transparent image in my email campaigns to check when it was read which works well for me.

I was reading a blog post the other day that said you can also track how long a person was reading an email and if they deleted or forwarded it! After some research I find email tracking services that can do this for me, but I am trying to build our own in-house tracker.

I would appreciate any possible implementation advice.

Thanks

Abs
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    Tracking via "web bugs" (small transparent images) is becoming increasingly useless because many E-Mail clients block them for privacy purposes. I've never heard of a reliable way to track forwarded or deleted messages - can you provide a link to the blog post? – Pekka Jan 01 '11 at 10:38
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    plus, I don't think it's legal or in any case sensible to spy on people like that. – markus Jan 01 '11 at 10:52
  • @Pekka - I can't find the blog post but take a look at these guys who offer this service. They say then can work out if an email was forwarded: http://bit.ly/grno6 – Abs Jan 01 '11 at 12:45
  • @tharkun - you might be right actually. Its just that we want to know exactly what happens when we market via email. I guess if its been forwarded its irrelevant but to know if it was deleted would be a good thing as it will show how engaging the email is. Btw, privacy isn't an issue as we will not look at the data on a per email basis just broad numbers such how many deleted the email of those 100 emails we sent. – Abs Jan 01 '11 at 12:47
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    The "Forward to a Friend" tracking is done through UI on their website by URL query parameters in the forwarding link. They don't / can't track someone clicking the forward button in their email client. – jasonbar Jan 01 '11 at 15:31
  • Logging a forward initiated by a click in the email client is possible, [this company](https://shiftmail.io) manage "forward" tracking without the use of a forwarding web page. In addition, they track prints, opens and read time in the same manner. Also it is not illegal to gather any of the types of metrics discussed above. – sousdev Sep 16 '16 at 19:06

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Reliable tracking as you wish to do is neither possible nor legal.

The image tracking method is very common but it does not represent an accurate tracking.

Its just possible within the same audience to compare metrics. For example compare two newsletter campaigns.

You could also get en estimate with the image teqnique as to how many users open your second newsletter after recieving the first etc.

But this is some statistical calculation stuff because you never really know whether the mail has been opened or not. Or whether the user maby has read it without loading images etc.

You can just say there will be users who load images, some who dont and some who don't read the mail at all.

If you have some referential data you can do statistical calculations.

The Surrican
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  • I am not sure where you got the legality part from. Several large web companies offer this service as a service. Secondly, if email tracking were illegal web analytics would also be illegal. As for if its possible or not, it is. Its just not very accurate. However, I am interested in ways to gauge deletion and forwarding of emails. – Abs Jan 02 '11 at 20:07
  • @Abs As i said. That is neither possible (technically) nor legal. Aso for the legal part: Show me ONE country that does not have the secrecy of correspondence in its constitution. Please also show me ONE of the several companies that offer "this service" and are not a hoax like just mailing a "read me here" link that points to a web page where you can do tracking. Web bugs are on the edge and in the grey zone of legality. Anything that goes further requires a consent with the user which is not possible in one way communication (with only one active part - which tracking is). – The Surrican Jan 03 '11 at 09:03
  • Companies that are legally incorporated that offer this sort of analytic: Litmus, CampaignMonitor, MailChimp - just Google them. I don't see why you think this is illegal when Stackoverflow is tracking you now via Google Analytics. Its the same thing. I am not asking for code that reads other peopls emails, just code that can detect when the email I sent is read! – Abs Jan 06 '11 at 16:14
  • Actually SO uses quantcast... – Abs Jan 06 '11 at 16:14